From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we mentioned last week, the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly lies in favor of the bulls.

We're seeing rotation supporting this move higher in equities; a sustained bid for SMIDs and Micro-Caps while Large-Cap indexes slowly work higher is all very constructive for the early innings of bull markets.

This environment is also providing bulls with an increasingly wide selection of areas to allocate capital - from Industrials, Technology, and Cylicals, and now Financials.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger more Macro thesis, we couldn't be happier to roll out and share our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We'll also be writing a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist. This is the first edition.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy.

Are you looking for trends in this market?

We are.

Here's one that stands out: U.S. Real Estate is making new All-Time Lows relative to the U.S. Stock Market:

I've been waiting for Europe to break out since I was in high school. That was over 20 years ago. And people have the audacity to tell me that stocks are in a bubble.

Are you kidding me?

This one comes up a lot. "JC, what has you concerned?".

This morning I was on the Alpha Trader Podcast with Aaron Task, former Digital Editor of Fortune and Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance. It was fun. I'll post the link when it's up next week.

But that's what he asked. What has me concerned?

And what's interesting is that nothing really "concerns" me. Because I don't really care. I'm too old for that shit. I can't worry about the economic and social implications of the market going up or down.

Stocks can get cut in half from here. Or they could double. I'm good either way. Bitcoin can go to zero. Not my problem. Gold can go to $100,000, or $100. Doesn't matter to me.

So I'm not "concerned" about anything. I just take it how it comes, when it comes. As investors, we have no choice. Well, as open-minded investors, anyway.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Consider this a special follow-up edition to our most recent 2-to-100 column, published earlier this week.

We update our 2-to-100 club universe every quarter as stocks will come on and off of the list as their market cap fluctuates above and below our criteria of about 2 to 30B.

There are also newly public stocks that need to be added and changes based on our technical criteria, among other things.

A lot of stocks grew above the $30B mark this year and unfortunately left the 2-to-100 club. On the other hand, there weren't too many that left due to falling below $2B.

This makes sense as all the stocks in the club are from tech/growth industries, many of which performed incredibly well in 2020.

The Telecom Giants have seen a good move this week. Let's take a look at these stocks to see if there are any interesting trade ideas here.

As we get into 2021, the same question keeps coming, "JC, when are we going to see a correction in the market?"

While it is true that some stocks have gone up, and others have gone up a lot in recent months, the biggest stocks of them all have not.

Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are the 4 biggest companies in the world. Throw in fellow behemoths Facebook and Alibaba, and now we're pushing $8 Trillion in market cap. That's big time money.

And you know what those stocks have done since September 2nd?

Nothing.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending January 8, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

We're back this month with another edition of the Josh & JC show.

This is where I sit down with my boy Josh Brown and talk about the most important Monthly Charts I see around the world.

I love doing this monthly show. Josh and I have been good friends for the better part of the past 2 decades. He knows me really well by now, and I think I've got a pretty good handle on him too, although he certainly finds ways to surprise me quite often.

On this month's show, we take a look at Financials potentially breaking out. One of the leaders is Goldman Sachs, as $GS is now back above its 2007 highs. Meanwhile, Consumer Discretionary is breaking out to new all-time highs relative to Consumer Staples, which is consistent with higher stock prices. But that doesn't mean that Staples can't do well on an absolute basis. And finally, Commodities are breaking out. Crude Oil is back above its 2016 lows. And with all of this bullish talk, what's it going to take to position ourselves more defensively? I lay out the 4 most important signals that we're watching.

Here's the video in full:

This is our ASC Research Q1 2021 Playbook.

The first section dives deep into the US Stock Market and Market breadth, then we discuss the International Markets and specific Factors around the world. Next we go into U.S. Sectors and the best looking Industry Groups. In the second half of the report, we dive into the FICC space (Fixed Income, Commodities & Currencies) and their Intermarket Relationships. Finally we finish up with Cryptos, Options and overall Market Sentiment.

You can skip right to the trade ideas here if you'd like, or give the full report a read!